2.14.2007

Intel's Tera-scale initiative

Intel has announced its path toward tera-scale computing, allowing "Teraflops of performance operating on Terabytes of data." The centerpiece of the progra right now is an 80-core demo chip with a radical architecture. Here is a great article with lots of graphics describing Intel's approach:

"The first teraflop chips are expected to reach manufacturing stage by 2010 to 2015."

As Moore's law continues, that means that we start seeing Petaflop chips in the 2030 to 2035 range, and at that point we have the processing power of the human brain on a single chip. See Robotic Nation for the implications of such a chip.